People, Citizens, Nations. Organizing Modern Schooling in Western Europe in the 19th Century: The Cases of Luxembourg and Zurich

Whereas school laws and syllabi are designed to normatively define the ideal of the future citizen, the actual organization of the school shows precisely what it means to be a current citizen of a particular nation-state. The thesis of the paper is that within the actual organizations of the school systems we find organizational rules and practices that represent traditions (understood as handed-down cultural models of order or cultural systems of reasoning) that are older than new school laws and syllabi. And when the latter are “imported,” they are always translated into these systems of reasoning. These handed-down systems of reasoning and organizing ensured cultural continuities, allowing the new school systems to be established in the context of nation building. These cultural continuities, expressed foremost in the organizational structures of the school, allowed the new school laws or the syllabi to be successfully implemented in the first place